Test Case: Debunking the Myths of Game Testing

Quality assurance testing is
one of the most common ways to break into a career in video games, but it’s
also one of the most misunderstood jobs in the industry. Year after year,
development studios vet fresh-faced applicants who believe that QA is little
more than an easy way to stash cash while playing their favorite games. QA
testers in the trenches know that the job is real work. Get In Media spoke with
the professionals to bust some myths and learn what you need to know to land a
job in the field.

Myth #1: QA Testers Just
Play Video Games

A love of gaming is required
to break into QA, but testers are more than glorified players, says John
Erskine, Director
of Studio Operations for Cloud Imperium Games, a game studio in Austin,
Texas that’s currently developing Star Citizen.

“People a lot of times
perceive that, ‘Oh, I’m going to get paid to play games,’ but [QA testing is]
much more of the engineering-type position,” he says. “The process of
testing is really about analyzing, looking for flaws, and then being able to
reproduce those flaws in a way that makes it so that an engineer can identify
the root cause and fix it. There’s a lot of analytical talent that’s required.”

That means taking a small
piece of a game and playing it over and over in as many ways as possible to
figure out if there are any bugs in the code and if so, how severe they are and
how they can be reproduced.

“It actually is
work,” explains Mike Stein, a
former QA tester for one of Metacritic’s
top
ten game publishers. “On one of the games I was testing, I was trying
to concentrate on a specific area and noticed there was a crash … I spent
three hours just scrolling around in menus back and forth, trying to figure out
how to accurately reproduce the crash.”

QA testers not only face the
same screens for hours; they also have to approach the game in a different way
than players who are aiming for the highest score or fastest time.

“Probably the biggest
challenge in terms of the job [is] the monotony,” Stein says. “You’re
playing the same game every single day. If you keep doing the exact same
things, you’re not going to find any new bugs, so it’s thinking about new ways
to try and root out bugs in a game.”

Myth #2: QA Testers Play
Lots of Games

Not usually. In most cases,
QA testers are assigned to a specific game then test sections of that game
until it is published, says Jared
Yeager, a former QA tester for one of Metacritic’s top ten game publishers, now working in developer
relations at OUYA.

“It could be a game that
takes three months to make, six months, nine months, maybe even longer,”
he says.

Testers usually don’t get to
pick the games they work on, either. That means that you could spend months
enveloped in the latest, sweetest AAA game or you could wind up testing games
designed for young children. If you’re looking for variety, major game
publishers are the place to go, Yeager says, but it’s not guaranteed that the
situation will be any different than at smaller studios.

“If you’re working for a
major publisher, they may have quite a few games in the pipe and they could see
value in having the tester on one game for the first four hours of the day and
then rotating them to another game for another four hours of the day,” he says.

Myth #3: No Skills Are Required

Quality assurance testing is
an entry-level job and can be a foothold to a career in game development or
production, but you won’t get a QA gig based on gaming passion alone. A firm
understanding of games, particularly the type of games you’ll be testing, is a
plus, but so are strong written and oral communication skills and a knack for
thinking outside the box, says Raulvin Coke, former Senior QA Manager for
MediaBrix, an advertising platform that’s placed brands on social and mobile
games like Candy Crush.

“You need to be very
personable as well because you work with a wide variety of people and
personalities,” Coke adds. “You’re going to be working with business
analysts who create the documentation for requirements and you’re going to work
with developers and you’re going to be that middle person, so you’re going to
have to translate business requirements into test cases and test plans.”

Clarity is crucial, Coke
says, so companies will need to ensure that you have the verbal and written
chops to identify a problem, explain how you found it, describe it in detail,
and replicate how to find it again.

“The interview process
at a QA company may involve several levels of written testing. So, for example,
they may test your attention to detail,” says Yeager. “You may see
ten sentences and you have to pick out all the grammar mistakes. Even some sort
of attention to detail, where when you’re filling out the application form,
they may have you circle all the different languages that you know and if you
happened to notice that one of the languages there actually was Klingon and
called that out, that sort of crazy attention to detail would get you some sort
of extra points.”

A common tactic hiring
managers use for assessing communication skills, Yeager says, is asking
potential job candidates to describe an everyday activity such as making a
phone call to someone who has never seen or heard of a telephone.

“You can draw diagrams
[and] basically go into as much as possible walking someone through an object
they’ve never seen before and how to use it,” Yeager says. “That’s
really kind of to see your ability to communicate through writing, so when you
actually get to the stage of testing a game and finding bugs, you have the
ability to communicate that clearly, if you’re not in the same room or have any
visual evidence of how that bug actually happened, for a developer to fix.”

“Especially in an online
environment like we have and like a lot of game companies are facing now, [QA
testers] have to respond very rapidly to issues that come up in the live
environment,” says Erskine. “It’s kind of unpredictable. It’s pretty
stressful. It’s oftentimes very, very long hours because you’re working towards
tight deadlines and the QA process is usually one of the last links in the
chain before something can be published.”

The Internet is full of
stories of frustrating work, little job security, and a scarcity of
professional respect for QA testers, but conditions vary dramatically between
game studios. Before submitting a resume, do some research into the company’s
design process and accounts from QA veterans.

Myth #5: You’ll Bank Big

Game testing is an investment
towards a bigger, wealthier career in gaming. It’s not a get-rich-quick scheme.
According to Game Developer’s 2012 salary survey,
“quality
assurance professionals are the lowest-paid people in the game industry,”
though salaries are steadily climbing. QA testers with less than three years of
experience raked in average salaries of $37,500 per year—about $18 per hour—and
most are hired on a contract basis, meaning that they probably won’t be
eligible for benefits like health insurance or 401K matches. Those coming into
the field with less experience and less knowledge of the gaming industry will
likely bring home smaller pay.

Erskine says that QA pay
varies dramatically depending on where you live and depends on how much
experience you bring to the table. Testers in game hubs like California may
rake in well over the average, but those in locales with lower average salaries
like Florida will most likely earn less.

The silver lining is that
overtime frequently abounds for quality assurance pros, particularly nearing
product launch time, and QA gigs can oftentimes be parlayed into better-paying
jobs in game development or another area of the company, says Stein. Those who
stay in quality assurance also move up the salary ladder relatively fast. Game
Developer’s salary survey reports that QA leads who stay in the field for
six years or more earn $55,192 per year on average.

Myth #6: You’ll Impact
Game Design

“I was actually
surprised at how removed I was from game development,” says Stein.
“… [In] QA, you are not making games. You are not making suggestions on
how to make the gameplay more fun … you’re there just to make sure that
everything is working and is not broken.”

Quality assurance testing can
potentially be a step to a game design and development job—both Stein and Yeager used their QA experience to land
higher development gigs in the game industry—though it’s debatable as to
whether it’s the most effective way to break into game development. If moving
into production or design is your ultimate goal, use an entry-level QA job as
an opportunity to learn how game builds and bug documentation work, make
networking connections, and chat with higher-ups who are currently working in
the job you want.

“There’s a lot to be
learned from [QA testing], and if you’re really pushing and taking advantage of
the opportunities that are there, it can be a great step in the ladder to game
design proper,” Stein says.

Editor’s note: Due to
nondisclosure agreements, we cannot publish the names of all game studios.